Everyone interviewed on the news is always saying how much great stuff Kwame has done, and I don't know if we have covered this here or not, but has he? Has he actually done so much good that it should be recognized as such?

Maybe I have not been looking, or maybe he is just a goof, but outside of all the stupid and illegal things he has done, has he done a lot of good?

A lot of the stuff that he counts as the good accomplished on his watch were started by previous administrations (e.g. the casinos, the new stadiums, Superbowl selection) or undertaken by private individuals or foundations with little help from the City (e.g. NextDetroit, targeted neighborhood revitalization project, OneD, Detroit RiverWalk).

Prior to this year, he did have a much better relationship with local business people and was able to work with people like those at Rock Financial in order get them to locate their new HQ downtown but I don't think that will come close to making up for half of the jobs that have left the city over his tenure (but how much of that should be attributed to the poor economy in MI in general?)

Crime was also down over the first few years of his tenure but both violent crime and property crime have increased significantly over the last half of his administration.

If there was one accomplishment that he could/should be proud of it should be the changes in many of the zoning and planning ordinances that have made it more attractive to folks to actually move into the CBD. There are much more variety of housing options downtown than there were just a couple of years back and I think a lot of this can be traced back to his push to get younger folks downtown as residents (now, I agree that many of the lofts and condos sit empty but with a region experiencing miniscule population growth, anybody with any brains could have seen that this would be a slow process and eventually downtown will reach a tipping point where new residents will be able to support increased commercial and retail activity downtown).

And although these are two small things, I think that residents have benefitted from policies he introduced that stopped building new gas stations in the city when there were many many old ones sitting vacant as brownfields (his staff makes every effort to provide incentives for new stations to come into locations where there was previously a station and clean it up and locate there instead of going to a new spot and making a whole new mess) as well as policies that put limits to the advertising of liquor and beer at party stores in the city (sure, the stores still sell the stuff, but there are not nearly as many advertisements plastered all over the walls and billboards for it as there was a few years back).